Pluto: the big-hearted dwarf + Katla Reawakening

Its career as a planet last for less than half its year. Pluto was discovered late, in 1930, as our final planet, completing the Sun’s brood of nine. (In hindsight it had been seen, but not recognized, as early as 1909.) But it was always an odd one, the runt of the litter, banished to the far flung regions of the Solar System. By 2006 the International Astronomical Union had seen enough. It instigated a new class of objects, intermediate between planets and asteroids (or minor planets), and re-assigned Pluto to be the primary member of this class, called dwarf planets. There were good reasons to do so: Pluto was just too small, on too strange an orbit, and worst of all, similar objects were being discovered. If Pluto was a planet, perhaps as many as 50 other objects out there could claim planethood too. NASA astronomers objected vehemently. NASA had just launched a mission to Pluto, called New Horizons. US Congress would not be well pleased if its money, awarded to investigate the last unexplored planet of the Solar System, would end up at a dwarf planet instead. The objections were overruled by a convincing vote. 76 years after being discovered and named, having travelled only a third of its 248-years orbit around the Sun, Pluto’s brief summer as a planet came to an end.

Still, this newly-named dwarf planet, frozen beyond belief, is a fascinating object. It has everything: weather, enormous climate change, active geology and volcanoes, a large heart on its surface, a family of satellites, and a mysterious past. Maybe being a dwarf planet should be a badge of honour, worthy of every penny spent by NASA.

An interesting aside, the name Pluto was first suggested by Venetia Burney, 11 years old at the time and living in Oxford. Of course we don’t know who named the original planets but perhaps this was also the work of children. Children have curiosity and want to push their horizons. Space was made for them.

This post will present our knowledge of Pluto, and its place in the Solar System, prior to the New Horizons encounter. Other (later) posts will be about New Horizons itself, and what we learned from the fly-by.

Children of the Sun

(solarviews.com)

Two decades ago, when everything was simpler, the Solar System had only two types of planets: the rocky or terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) and the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). Pluto as a solid body was classed with the rocky planets.

The four rocky planets all have iron cores, underneath a silicate mantle. They have only small amounts of the so-called volatiles: water, methane, CO2. There is a reason for this deficit. The planets formed from solid particles which came together. Each mineral has a temperature below which it can be a solid (there is no liquid phase in vacuum). For iron and silicates, this condensation happens at when temperatures drop below a balmy 800-1000 Kelvin, but water, methane and CO2 freeze out only below a chilly 200 K. The rocky planets formed at a distance from the young Sun where the temperatures were in the range 300 to 600 Kelvin. So water, and other volatiles, were in a gas phase and absent from the solid particles which made up these planets.

The 200-K temperature was reached somewhere within the asteroid belt. This is called the snow line. Further out, water became solid. Any ‘rocky’ planets forming out here would contain major amounts of water. In reality, the boundary wasn’t as sharp as the name ‘snow line’ implies, and the fraction of water in planets slowly increases further out, being very low for Earth, larger for Mars, and larger still for many asteroids.

The four gas giants are nowadays divided into two groups. Jupiter and Saturn, the monsters of the Solar System, are true gas giants. Uranus and Neptune, rather smaller but still 15 times heavier than the Earth, are considered water giants. They contain huge oceans in their mantles, above a rocky, Earth-like core.

The moons of the large gas giants, being outside the snow line, also are a mixture of rock and ice, with more ice than found in a typical asteroid. In all these objects, ‘ice’ is mainly water ice but it also contains ammonia, CO2, and methane.

Plutonian

How does Pluto compared to the rest of the family? If you like your information in numerical form, a Pluto factsheet is maintained by NASA. But the facts need interpreting.

Pluto’s mass may seem impressive, but it is positively minute compared to the planets: it is a midget, only 0.2% of the Earth, and 20 times less than the smallest planet, Mercury. Embarrassingly, seven moons in the Solar System are larger than Pluto. The orbit is also strange for a planet, very elliptical, with the distance to the Sun varying by 50%. For comparison, for Earth it varies only by 3.5%, and for Mars (the most elliptical orbit among the planets) the variation is 18%. Pluto is in a different league. The orbit is also well outside the plane of the ecliptic where all other planets are found. It really is an outcast.

Pluto is just about large enough that during formation, the interior would have melted from the heat of the colliding fragments. The melting will have allowed the denser silicates to sink down, and Pluto is thus expected to have a rocky core, surrounded by a water mantle. There is also an atmosphere, mainly consisting of nitrogen, with a pressure of 10 microbar, comparable to the Earth’s atmosphere 100 kilometer above the surface. Temperatures at Pluto are around 40 Kelvin, or -243 C. (If you live in one of the seven countries following the Polish-born Daniel Fahrenheit, this is -387 F.)

The internal structure of Pluto. Source: wikipedia

Pluto’s giant moon is called Charon. ‘Giant’ is relative, but Charon is large enough that some consider it a dwarf planet in its own right. Whereas Pluto has a diameter of 2370 km, Charon is 1200 km across. (For comparison, our Moon is 3475 kilometer across.) Four more moons were discovered in recent years. They are very much smaller, and a bit further from Pluto than Charon. Interestingly, the orbits are in resonance: the orbital periods scale approximately as 1:3:4:5:6, which is the only way such closely spaced moons can stay in stable orbits. The four large moons of Jupiter have the same kind of resonance.

Charon takes 6.4 days to orbit Pluto (that is the ‘1’ in the 1:3:4.. sequence above). Pluto’s own rotation period is also 6.4 days, as is Charon’s day. In other words, they are tidally locked, both always showing the same face to each other, just like our Moon does to us (but the Earth does not to the Moon).

Making Pluto

How did this complex system form? It seems unlikely that a dwarf planet so far out in the Solar System can pick up 5 satellites! There are too few free objects around there for such multi-dating. The circular orbits of the moons suggest that they formed in situ, around Pluto, and were not captured from abroad. The large size of Charon is most easily explained as caused by a major impact during the formation of Pluto, which effectively split proto-Pluto in two. This impact would have been even more devastating (relatively speaking) than the one that formed our Moon. The other moons could have formed from debris from this impact. But could such a major impact have happened in such an empty region of the Solar System? Isn’t it a bit like a world-class collision in a road-less region in the desert heart of Australia, traversed by one vehicle per month?

A clue comes from the densities of Pluto and Charon. These are around 1800 kg/m3, midway between ice and rock, meaning that both are very roughly equal parts ice and rock. This is very similar to Titan and Enceladus, moons of Saturn. The moons of Jupiter, in contrast, are denser and have more rock than ice. Remember that the further from the Sun a planet or moon formed, the higher fraction of ice it contains (Earth has essentially none). Pluto will thus have formed somewhere in the general region of Saturn, which is much closer to the Sun than it is now. During a chaotic phase in the early Solar System, a lot of smaller bodies were thrown out of this region by encounters with Saturn and Neptune. It explains the strange orbit of Pluto. The collision that formed Charon could also have happened during this period of chaos.

Surface features

Long before New Horizons was launched, we knew that Pluto has an interesting surface. Its brightness changed, such that the dwarf was considerably brighter when the side facing Charon was pointed towards us. There was a more reflective material on that side, and the most likely culprit was ice; nitrogen ice, to be precise, which is white at very low temperature, around 40 K. (When ‘warmed’ to 60 K, it becomes transparent, and at 63 K it evaporates.)

The Hubble Space Telescope had a go at mapping tiny Pluto. It found a particular bright region, neighbouring a very dark area. The dwarf planet also appeared to be changing: over a decade, the northern (darker) hemisphere was brightening, and the southern hemisphere fading. Over this time, the density of the puny atmosphere had doubled. Pluto was showing seasons!

We now know that the bright region is the same as the ‘heart’ found by New Horizons. Discoveries often have history.

Seasons of the heart

Pluto’s seasons are funny. Of course, this far from the Sun’s warmth, the seasons change between winter and ice age; you would not expect to find anything resembling summer!

On Earth the seasons are determined purely by the tilt of the polar axis. The angle between the orbit around the Sun and the Earth’s rotation is 23 degrees: this tilt causes the varying length of day, and the varying height of the Sun above the horizon. Within 23 degrees of the equator, the Sun can get to the zenith: these are the tropics. Within 23 degrees of the pole, there are times when the Sun doesn’t set or doesn’t rise, depending on the season: these are the polar regions.

Pluto’s inclination is more than double that of Earth, at 57 degrees. This makes the seasons much more extreme. (The tilt is actually 123 degrees: the planet rotates upside-down and the Sun rises in the West. But the effect is the same as a tilt of 57 degrees.) As the dwarf moves around the Sun, at a certain point in its 248-year orbit the Sun will be above the equator: this is the equinox when day and night are the same length, everywhere on Pluto. A quarter orbit along, the Sun is only 33 degrees from the north pole of Pluto: the southern quarter of the planet is now in perpetual darkness and the northern quarter in perpetual sunlight. Than the Sun moves back to the equator, and finally to close to the south pole, and the polar day and night are reversed.

On Pluto, the ‘tropics’ (this name could be seen as optimistic) and the polar regions overlap: there is a region at intermediate latitudes where during the summer the Sun gets to zenith, therefore it counts as the tropics, but this Sun never sets, and half an orbit later the same region has a perpetual polar night; so it is both tropical and polar. At the moment, the Sun is not far from the equator and all of Pluto gets some sunlight. Spring has begun in the North, and the South is heading towards its century-long winter night. Pluto’s climate was designed for Sleeping Beauty.

A second problem is that the distance to the Sun changes so much during the Pluto year. Closest approach occurs during the spring equinox in the North (or autumn equinox in the South). The northern summer and southern winter happen when Pluto is far from the Sun. The South therefore has more extreme temperatures – a colder winter and warmer summer. The South has climate and the North has weather. Also, note that Pluto moves much slower when further from the Sun, so that the seasons are of very unequal length.

With Pluto just coming out of the northern winter, the expectation was that at the moment there is a nitrogen ice cap in the north, in the process of evaporating, while the southern ice cap has not yet started to reform. The atmosphere is therefore denser than usual. As Pluto moves away from the Sun, much of it will condense as frost and ice, on the southern hemisphere. The ice cap resembles an anti-swallow, migrating from winter to winter.

Is there life on Pluto?

No.

Pluto’s siblings

There are four groups of objects in the outer Solar System similar to Pluto, ranging from puny to Pluto-sized. Over a thousand objects are known, several of which are large enough to be dwarf planets. Together they are called the Kuiper belt.

The first, and largest, group contains the ‘classical objects’: they have mildly elliptical orbits, around 42 to 45 AU (1 AU is the distance Earth-Sun; Pluto is at 39 AU), and most are close to the plane of the ecliptic where the planets are found.

The second group have the same orbital period as Pluto but very elliptical orbits (each one different) and a variety of inclinations to the plane of the ecliptic. These are called the plutinos. Their orbits are in a 2:3 resonance to Neptune, meaning that for every three orbits of Neptune, they do exactly 2. Many cross the orbit of Neptune (as does Pluto), but because of this resonance they never come close or collide. There probably used to be more, but any that had different orbital periods were slowly removed by Neptune. Gravity is a bastard: it can be slow and weak, but it always wins.

The third group is the ‘scattered disk’: these objects are much further out and their orbits are highly elliptical. The dwarf planet Eris, almost as big as Pluto, is a member of this group. They have clearly been thrown out here after coming too close to one of the giant planets, probably Jupiter, and coming off worst. Now they are the cricket/baseball out-fielders: hanging around, not doing much, waiting to catch the odd ball coming their way.

The largest Kuiper belt objects. Source: wikipedia

Finally, a few of the moons of the giant planets are similar to Pluto, including Phoebe (orbiting Saturn) and Triton (orbiting Neptune).

Triton is in some ways the other Pluto. It orbits Neptune in the opposite direction to Neptune’s rotation. That indicates it hasn’t always been there but was captured by Neptune at some time. Triton is a bit larger than Pluto and has a little bit higher density: a bit more rock and a bit less ice; thus, it probably formed closer to the Sun, perhaps near Jupiter. Like Pluto, Triton has a nitrogen atmosphere. Triton was photographed during the Voyager encounter, in 1989. It showed a surface that is a mixture of dirt and nitrogen ice: the lack of impact craters suggests that the ice is quite young (or re-formed regularly).

The surface of Triton, as photographed by Voyager

Most excitingly, Voyagers found geysers on the surface, ejecting gas kilometers high. These were only seen where the sun was directly above Triton, in the zenith. The geysers are probably from nitrogen: phreatic nitrogen volcanoes. Nitro-thermal activity, if you prefer.

Volcanoes

The geysers of Triton raise the question how common volcanoes are, out there in Tevya’s frozen wastelands (from Sholem Aleichem’s Fiddler).

All rocky planets have volcanoes (remember Venus). These planets produce liquid rock, which rises to the surface as lava, either effusively or explosively. But the outer Solar System has less rock, and more ice. Would you expect volcanoes? And to melt the magma, a heat source is needed. Does that even exist in these small, cold bodies?

Io, the hellish moon of Jupiter, is a clear case in favour. It is the most volcanic surface in the Solar System; the heat is supplied by huge tides (on solid rock!) from its boss, Jupiter. Nearby, the asteroid Vesta once had a magma ocean, albeit only when it was young. But both of these bodies formed close to the snow line, and still are largely rock. Further out, where ice rules, volcanoes are very different.

Here, on the ice worlds, you would expect that volcanoes erupt liquid water rather than liquid rock. Many of the moons are now believed to have water oceans deep underneath the surface, and these take up the role of a ‘water magma’. But water is not a good volcanic substance. When rock melts, it becomes less dense and the magma therefore rises up towards the surface. When ice melts, its density increases and the resulting liquid tries to sink. You know this from experience: ice floats but rocks sink. Down is the wrong direction for volcanic eruptions.

Turning water into a gas does give the required upward pressure, perhaps even too much of it. This gasification can happen close to the surface and results in a Yellowstone: huge geysers erupting into the sky. (Under near-vacuum, liquid water does not exist and all eruptions become gaseous when reaching the surface.) The result is seen on Enceladus: geysers erupting from a sub-surface ocean, going so high that some water escapes altogether and ends up on other moons. The geysers of Enceladus are one of Brian’s wonders of the Solar System. Would you call this a volcano? When it goes this high, you might as well. (But to play the devil’s advocate, comets work the same way and would you call the jets that form their tails volcanic?)

Even further out in the Solar System, the surfaces are mainly nitrogen ice. When this is transparent, sunlight can penetrate and heat the material underneath. This is probably what powers the geysers of Triton. At 40K, nitrogen ice is white rather than transparent and this underground heating does not work. So one might expect that Pluto would not have such geysers.

The ninth planet

Let’s come back to the plutinos. A paper published in early 2016 pointed out that their orbits were remarkably similar, with the closest approach to the Sun occurring in the same area of space. This was a strange alignment which could not have happened by accident.

Models show that only the gravitational pull of another body could do this. This body would be perhaps 200 to 1000 times further from the Sun than we are, on an elliptical orbit with a period as long as 10,000 year, and could be as massive as Uranus or Neptune, large enough that there should be no doubt about its classification as a planet. The models appear quite convincing. We haven’t found it yet and it will be very faint. But it does appear that the Solar System again has nine planets, not eight, and the final member which occupies the vacancy left by demoted Pluto is our third water giant. It cannot have formed as far out as it appears to be now: most likely it formed close to Saturn, and was ejected during an ill-advised close approach, in the years of chaos in the young Solar System. Now it lives in the Solar System’s Siberia, far from civilization but still out there after all these years. A true wanderer.

If we only knew where it was, New Horizons could perhaps be redirected at it. It might take a century to get there, but the US Congress’ money would still be used for its original purpose: visiting the final planet of the Solar System.

New Horizons

So we knew a fair amount about Pluto. And finally a spacecraft came to have a look. New Horizons was launched in 2006, still in the years of Pluto’s planethood, and traveled for nine years, with a quick fly-by of Jupiter on the way to pick some extra speed. On 4 July 2015 it reached Pluto. Unable to carry enough fuel to stop, it flew past within hours. These hours transformed our knowledge. The dwarf planet became the world with the big heart.

To be continued

Albert

Katla Reawakening?

View over Katla photographed by Dagur Bragason today. Used by kind permission by the photographer.

Over the years I have written very little about Katla. The reason for this is that Katla has done very little to merit an article. Here at Volcanocafé we have written a few posts about Katla, but all have been attempts to put facts up against all the alarmist trash that has been written over the years.

This has though changed lately, but before we start talking about resent activity we need to look a bit at Katla to have our facts straight. In other words, we need a historic background to judge what is happening against previous eruptions. Below I will only write about eruptions that are known to really have happened and I am not included mini-eruptions or eruptions only to be found in the heads of people with feverish minds.

Background of Katla

Historic size and distribution diagram by Icelandic Met Office. Note that M3.4 was the largest recorded earthquake up to last week.

Katla is the third largest volcano in Iceland with Bárdarbunga and Grímsvötn being slightly larger. All 3 of them come with slightly different “flavours”. Bárdarbunga is more into large effusive eruptions and small explosive eruptions. Grimsvötn is all over the map producing explosive eruptions ranging from VEI-2 to VEI-6 and has had 3 known large effusive rifting fissure eruptions.

And a plot showing todays hubbub. Notice that the twin M4.5 expended 1.5 times as much energy than all recorded Katla earthquakes in one go. Image by Icelandic Met Office.

Katla is more consistent with predominantly large explosive eruptions from the caldera and one prolonged large effusive eruption. Katla has had 30 eruptions since 820 giving an average of 40 years between eruptions. That average is though just a statistical number that obviously can differ a lot.

The longest repose time during that time was 100 years and the shortest well dated repose time is 12 years.

In regards of how explosive the eruptions has been we get a pretty good picture from the records. I am here only using those eruptions that has a classification in the Global Volcanism Program from 820 and onwards. 3 eruptions had a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 3, 14 eruptions had a VEI of 4 and 4 eruptions had a VEI of 5.

The average size of the eruptions is why Katla has such a fearsome reputation, especially since it is located unusually close to settlements. After all, the volcano has an average size of eruptions that ranges somewhere between a medium sized VEI-4 to a borderline VEI-5.

During eruptions between 0.05 to 5 cubic kilometers of ash is released and here the bad news is that the ash is very fine grained and needle like, so the effects on air traffic during an eruption could be significant depending on the weather pattern during onset of eruption.

The greatest threat to the locals is the well known very large jökulhlaups that will come pouring out of the caldera during an eruption. These jökulhlaups are so large that they can remove entire farms, take out a long stretch of the national highway and usually changes the entire landscape. During the last eruption the jökulhlaup transformed the entire coastline below Myrdalsjökull and the ash, mud and stones deposited added several square kilometers to the surface of Iceland.

The extreme oddball of the eruptions is the Éldgja fissure eruption that started in 934 and lasted into 940 and deposited 18 cubic kilometers of fresh lava.

Current activity

Alftagrof station, image by Icelandic Met Office.

In 2013 the earthquake pattern of Katla changed and recurrent brief episodes of small deep earthquakes started. Those earthquakes range between 20 and 30km+ depth and are a sign of magma moving upwards into the system of the volcano. During early 2016 the size and frequency of these earthquakes increased indicating an increased rate of magma influx from depth.

During all of the years that we have had instrumented recordings of earthquake sizes in Iceland Katla has suffered a few M3+ earthquakes with the record being at M3.4. So it was a bit of a surprise last week when Katla banged off an earthquake that was M3.5. It was shallow and the signature indicated that it was related to hydrothermal activity caused by fluid movement.

And here we come to today’s earthquakes. During the night leading to today there was a brief and intriguing earthquake swarm in the northern part of the caldera. A spot that Henrik Lovén already in 2011 pointed towards being both the most likely spot for an eruption, and as being the most likely for a slightly larger eruption in a series of articles he published here debunking that Katla would erupt soon (it was during the Katla scare following Eyjafjallajökull).

So, what makes this brief earthquake swarm so interesting? First of all we have to take into account the size. After all we had a new record earthquake size last week, and now we had 2 earthquakes within 20 seconds apart measuring M4.5. And as everyone knows the destructive force is 27 times larger in an M4.5 earthquake compared to an M3.5 earthquake. So, the record was not only broken, it was shattered completely.

Another way to look at it would be like this, within a minute Katla released more seismic energy than has been recorded by instrument for that volcano. Yes, those two earthquakes released more energy than all of the ten thousand plus recorded earthquakes at Katla, something to ponder indeed.

Another thing is that during the hour prior to the two large earthquakes we have several episodes that can be interpreted as fluid movement and one episode after. This would indicate that fluid started to move, putting pressure on the magma reservoir causing two large tectonic type earthquakes that in turn created a void that more fluid moved into.

The depth of the events makes it highly unclear if it was magma or hydrothermal fluid (super hot water) that was on the move. After the event the earthquake swarm has continued with smaller earthquakes with the largest as I write being M3.3.

Volcano forecast

Slysaalda station, image by Icelandic Met Office.

Last week I wrote an article about Grimsvötn where I described my favorite method of modeling the likelihood of an upcoming eruption, the finite element threshold analysis modeling method. It basically is a way to try to calculate how much pressure increase a volcano can take before it ruptures like an old boiler tank.

And like an old boiler tank a volcano will creak and groan as it closes in on an explosion and that the amount of creaks and groans will increase exponentially as the volcano closes in on an eruption. For Katla we do not know how much of the creaks and groans there will be prior to an eruption being inevitable.

I will here return to the known increase of magma influx from depth and the very sudden increase in energy released as earthquakes at Katla. In my view a volcano that suddenly changes its pattern is about to do so in more ways than just as being more seismically active. In my way of modeling this is exactly the kind of sign a volcano would give as it comes close to the breaking point that the model predicts.

I am certain that the volcano has reached the tipping point of no return. If things calm down now it will still be closer to an eruption and if it continues or intensifies it is only a question of a relatively short time before we get the steady thrumming earthquake swarm that we know from other Icelandic eruption run ups. Right now I would say that we are days to years away from an eruption, but if the activity continues or intensifies I would say we are days to weeks away. The change in behavior is after all that significant.

In 2011 Henrik Lovén wrote this; “While a larger “proper” eruption of Katla in the VEI 3 – 5 range cannot be ruled out, I find one unlikely at present as the current activity mostly is in areas already depleted of evolved magmas by geologically speaking very recent major eruptions. Also there is little sign of the uplift required on GPS. If one were to occur, the odds for one towards the upper end of what Katla is able of ought to be better in the Eastern to Northern parts of the caldera.”

This also follows the modeling prediction that the greatest likelihood of an eruption occurring in a part that has not recently erupted since the pressure there should be larger, a pattern that is known for the Icelandic caldera volcanoes.

In short, if I use my own model of prediction (and I should) it seems to say that Katla is nearing an eruption. Due to lack of data prior to an eruption I can’t calculate when exactly it will occur, but if the current swarm continues over an extended period or suddenly intensifies and continues we should see an eruption in the not too distant future.

For those interested in a more in depth explanation of the finite element threshold method I recommend my previous article about Grimsvötn.

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From an Icelandic friend: Apparently, 6 scientists from IMO had a meeting with paliament commitee this noon, giving update of the current situation and to go over eruption scenarios as well as emergency procedures in case of an eruption in Katla.

It is only prudent and typical of Icelandic thoroughness. It is not an indication that Katla is infallibly bound to erupt within the next few days or weeks, rather going over contingency plans if and when she does.

“Sex experts at IMO met with en­vironmental and sam­göngu­nefnd­ar this morn­ing and discus­sed with the Comm­ittee und­er the item eart­hqua­kes at the Katla. Introduce the situati­on for mem­bers, cont­ingency plan and a variety of background in­formati­on.”